Steve writes editorials for each issue of Forbes under the heading of “Fact and Comment.” A widely respected economic prognosticator, he is the only writer to have won the highly prestigious Crystal Owl Award four times. The prize was formerly given by U.S. Steel Corporation to the financial journalist whose economic forecasts for the coming year proved most accurate.

In both 1996 and 2000, Steve campaigned vigorously for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. Key to his platform were a flat tax, medical savings accounts, a new Social Security system for working Americans, parental choice of schools for their children, term limits and a strong national defense. Steve continues to energetically promote this agenda.

"The Staples Principle" Of Free Market Wealth Creation

Economists miss the point when they say innovation is about improving “efficiency.” Free market creativity means producing abundance. The distinction is vital when it comes to appreciating why markets are moral. New technologies not only help people work more productively. They produce more—more products and services for lower cost. In this way innovation improves living standards and, yes, to use that term statists love, “spreads the wealth.”

One of the first thinkers to describe how this occurs was Henry Adams, the Harvard historian and grandson of President John Quincy Adams. In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, he reflected on what he called “The Law of Acceleration”: the ever-quickening pace of technological advances that spawned inventions like the ocean steamer, the railway, the electric telegraph, and the daguerreotype. Once considered “impossibilities,” these advances, Adams observed, led to ever more abundance. Adams gives the example of “the coal-output of the United States [growing] from nothing to three hundred million tons or more” in the course of the nineteenth century.

Adams’s intellectual descendant is Gordon Moore, the co- founder of Intel, who observed that the rate of computing power, reflected by the number of transistors on a silicon chip, doubles approximately every eighteen to twenty-four months.

Moore’s law is why the computer you purchase today delivers two times more power per dollar than one bought two years ago. It’s why the memory in your iPod that costs only $49 today cost $7,000 twelve years ago.

These examples of ever-accelerating innovation and efficiency at lower and lower cost account for what we call “the Staples principle”: Technologies out of reach for most people today end up at Staples or another big box retailer at cheap prices, if not tomorrow, then in the very near future.

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